A martyr of Communist Russia, Mother Catherine of Siena, founded a convent of Third Order Dominicans before being sentenced to more than a decade of solitary confinement. It has been said, purportedly by G.K. Chesterton, that when people stop believing in God, they don’t believe in nothing but in anything. Even worse is that the [...]
Henry Clay and Sam Rayburn fit well with Willmoore Kendall’s views of the democratic statesman. Both were skilled politicians who sought the good, avoided extremism, and consciously represented the people in Congress. For many centuries, scholars have written weighty tomes on statesmanship. In the twentieth century in particular, many students of the American political philosopher [...]
Charlie Kirk believed that America’s myths were both truths and facts worth cherishing. The story of America, he insisted, was not original sin without redemption, but sin and redemption together—the kind of story that could inspire loyalty, sacrifice, and renewal. Eventually, he would sacrifice himself for it. England could have been thrown into the cauldron [...]
Christopher Columbus wielded a strong mystical side, believing that he was acting as the right hand of Providence. So, some public statues are still coming down, but nowhere nearly as violently or as frequently as they were toppled last year. Indeed, 2020 was one of the most violent years I can remember, comparable to the [...]
The sun rose steadily over main street in the mornings. The air was cool and light. The sky was clear. City workers watered the flowers on the lampposts. An older man sat on a bench and read the newspaper, and a young mother rocked her baby gently. A father held his little girl’s hand, and [...]
"The Blithedale Romance" conveys Nathaniel Hawthorne’s disillusionment with Brook Farm, Transcendentalism, reform movements, and the quest for individual and social perfection. I. Published in 1852, The Blithedale Romance offers Nathaniel Hawthorne’s most trenchant criticism of America.[i] Unlike his more optimistic contemporaries who imagined the advance toward individual and social perfection in the United States, Hawthorne [...]
What is it that makes life worth living when the temporal aspects of life are taken care of? That is the realm of culture and the spirit. It has to do with the development of our minds, our moral growth, and our sense of belonging to a community. “The empires of the future are the [...]
Seeing the works of the early decades of the twentieth century by Robert Hugh Benson and Hilaire Belloc as part of a living tradition of historical scholarship, we might hope that the revival of interest in their historical perspectives might prove inspirational to new generations of pioneering cultural figures in the twenty-first century. The reception [...]
A Victorian cleric named Joseph Leycester Lyne dreamed of establishing an Anglican monastery at Llanthony, Wales. Lyne took the name of Father Ignatius and has gone down in history as one of the most eccentric and and energetic of all Anglo-Catholic pretenders. Ignatius of Llanthony During the first years of my quarter of [...]
What do we know of Catherine of Aragon, the first to suffer the pains of the so-called Reformation? All Catholics know the Salve Regina, the “Hail, Holy Queen,” the Marian antiphon sung in praise of the Blessed Virgin Mary, the Queen of Heaven, who is without doubt and without question the most sung of all the [...]
What is history if not a “survey,” and what are historians if not chain-bearers? Have you reckoned a thousand acres much? —Walt Whitman, Song of Myself History records that in 1763 two guys surveyed a demarcation line separating Pennsylvania and Maryland as well as bits of Delaware and West Virginia. The surveyors were Charles Mason [...]
The Constitution consummated the work commenced by the Declaration of Independence—a work in which the people of the North American Union had achieved the most transcendent act of power that social man in his mortal condition can perform. John Quincy Adams, at the time a former President of the United States and member of the [...]
Starting just 30 years after the Crucifixion, Catholic England produced remarkable figures, including lesser-known luminaries like Bishop Robert Grosseteste, who pioneered the scientific method. In my book Faith of Our Fathers: A History of True England, I sought to present a panoramic overview of two thousand years of English history, from the first century to the [...]
The question of the purpose of peace has troubled humanity from the time an ancient hand was first raised in anger. It is one thing to win a war and impose peace on a vanquished enemy, and altogether another thing to cultivate one’s own victorious city or nation once the wolf has been held at [...]